Single Post Wins Google Contest

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Single Post Wins Google Contest

The organizers of an international search engine placement contest crowned their champion Wednesday. In the end, the victor was a popular blogger who got his readers to do his work for him.

Anil Dash won the second, and final, round of the two-month SEO Challenge, which called on webmasters and site owners to use any method at their disposal to score the top Google ranking for a made-up term, "nigritude ultramarine."

Dash's strategy differed greatly from that of the first-round winner, named a month ago, who claimed his victory through the use of backlinking, a technique in which the required words on other people's sites were hyperlinked back to his site.

In contrast, Dash became the overall winner by virtue of a single post on his blog in which he asked his readers to link from their own sites. Countless numbers did and – after his very late entry assumed the top Google spot shortly after the competition's first round ended – Dash was never seriously challenged.

"The impetus (was) for me, on a fluke, to say, 'Hey, I don't want these guys who do link spamming to win the contest,'" said Dash. "I figured that people would be fighting the contest the whole month and coming up with new and innovative ways to get their page ranking up, but it didn't happen."

Indeed, according to Brandon Suit, the first-round winner, Dash's victory was a fait accompli from the moment he entered the competition. No amount of search engine optimization expertise or technique, Suit said, could match the page-ranking strength of Dash's popular blog, which discusses technology and blogging, and the sheer number of readers who agreed to link to his contest entry.

Suit said he conceded to Dash a month ago, paraphrasing a consolation message he got from a friend, "Anil's entry into this contest (was) like a NASCAR driver entering a Go-Kart race."

The contest, sponsored by Australian affiliate marketing company DarkBlue and SearchGuild.com, was designed to spotlight the various techniques used by search engine optimizers to boost sites' Google results. Those results are often a key factor in businesses' fortunes.

But Google is known for frequently changing its ranking methods, largely in an attempt to foil people who seek to manipulate its system with new tricks to improve their placement. Some charge that, partly as a result of these repeated adjustments to its ranking methodology, Google doesn't always return the most relevant results.

Nevertheless, Chris Ridings, the competition's organizer, told Wired News at the time of the first-round judging that it's easier for people to claim they can outfox Google than to actually demonstrate their prowess. The competition, he said, provides a stage for search optimization experts to show how strong particular ranking techniques really are.

To Dash, then, winning the flat-screen television awarded to the second-round victor was testament to the power of good content and a longstanding online presence.

"A lot of people are trying to increase their page rank unethically," said Dash. "I think if we show them (that) the best thing you can do is to write really good material, then hopefully, they'll spend their time doing that (instead of) spending time coming up with ways to graffiti other people's pages."

Furthermore, Dash maintained, his victory proves one thing: That the Web is a meritocracy.

"A page that's read by people instead of robots is going to do better," he said.